Hunger series

Gradually they became bottom-shelf goods. The one-time delicacies of the chicken stomach, liver and heart made their way further and further down the refrigerated section of the grocery store. Sometimes they disappeared all together.

At eye level now are piles of chicken breast in their shrink-wrapped Styrofoam trays. Just 20 years ago, up to 70 percent of whole chickens were sold in stores. Now Germany buys up to 80 percent of their chicken in parts - above all the breast.

Cheap EU meat floods Ghana

While the giblets, wings, neck or lower legs disappeared from the German shelves, these parts began to appear more often as cheap frozen meat products in West and Central Africa - for example, in Ghana.

Since 1995, poultry exports from the EU to Ghana have increased from a few thousand metric tons to 40,000 (44,100 short tons) last year. That's 40 percent of the total market for chicken meat in Ghana. The remaining 60 percent comes from the United States and Brazil.

The price of frozen meat from the EU has sunk as low as 60 to 70 cents per kilogram. But a Ghanaian poultry farmer needs to make three or four euros per kilo off his meat in order to earn a living.

Only in remote rural regions of Ghana, which European chicken does not reach, has everything remained the same. There consumers buy the chicken live and slaughter them themselves. But in the cities, domestic production has completely collapsed. Up to 95 percent of meat now comes from abroad, Stig Tanzmann of the Church Development Service said in an interview with Deutsche Welle.

One hundred thousand jobs in the country have been lost because of this, Tanzmann estimates. And it's not only the small-time poultry farmers who have lost their income. The exports from the EU have also spelled the end for feed producers, as well as those who butchered, plucked and gutted the chickens. The end of the poultry trade could also be a step back in the otherwise successful fight against hunger in Ghana.

Harmful cocktail of subsidies

The culprits seem easy to identify: Consumers in developed countries. They blindly follow their desire for chicken breast, without stopping to think about what happens with the rest of the meat.

For Tanzmann, that's not the whole story: "It does have to do with our consumer behavior, yes, but it can also be tied to the orientation of agricultural policy."

The European Union subsidizes the building of new animal pens, he said, which causes the chicken rearing industry to expand artificially.

According to the environmentalist group Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND), the EU handed out around 60 million euros ($81 million) for the building of poultry facilities in Germany alone. On top of that are the millions in payments to build new slaughterhouses.

That's not enough, said Marita Wiggerthale, a world nutrition expert with Oxfam. The EU no longer pegs its subsidies to how much a farmer produces, but rather to the size of the cultivatable land, she said. Still, its subsidies have a clear influence on the amount of the supply, and thus the price.

The environmental group BUND sees things the same way. It concluded in a study that around 650,000 hectares of German soil are producing chicken feed. For these farms, the EU pays around 220 million euros per year in Germany alone.

"Without subsidies for these farms, the production of feed would be more expensive," said the study. Cheap poultry feed reduces the cost of fattening the chickens, it concludes, and this threatens the existence of poultry farmers in Ghana who receive no subsidies at all.

More efficient farming

"The EU's agricultural policy is no longer the main factor in the growing hunger worldwide," countered Harald von Witzke, agricultural economist at Berlin's Humboldt University. "Rather, development aid and the countries that receive it have neglected farming." Farmers in developing countries have to become more productive, he said, and they are capable of doing so. They just need modern productive seeds, efficient plant protection methods and chemical fertilizers.

This could also avoid one half of the crop loss, von Witzke said: 40 percent of potential yield in developing countries is currently lost due to plant disease and pests. On top of that, an additional 20 to 40 percent is lost due to insufficient transport, storage and processing capabilities.

The UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) warns of this as well. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region that uses the least amount of modern seeds, and access to modern plant protection and fertilizers is especially poor. Malnutrition there is also the world's highest, at 35 percent.

Tariffs on top of subsidies

In order to be able to invest in agriculture, poorer countries have to be able to protect themselves from cheap foreign goods, Tanzmann argued. But a lack of political assertiveness is a barrier, he said, as is the case in Ghana. When the country discussed raising import taxes on poultry, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund threatened to cut off all credit. Ghana's government backed off, as its budget would have collapsed without international aid.

The EU, however, protects its domestic poultry market through import duties. This keeps prices of imported poultry artificially high, Tanzmann said, creating an indirect subsidy for the export of the rest of the chicken. This is why poor farmers in Ghana gain little from cheap imported chicken, he added: Firstly because a lack of proper cooling technology means the meat can often turn bad, and secondly because research by the Church Development Service found that the prices for imported chicken parts have dramatically increased in the past three years. Without domestic competition, the price of 2.50 euros per kilo at the Kaneshi market in the capital, Accra, is suddenly almost as much as the complete chicken used to be.

Is European agriculture needed?

Agricultural economist von Witzke said he also believes that rising food prices in the short term are a catastrophe for the hungry. But in the long term, higher prices will ultimately be beneficial, he said, "because that will create an incentive to develop a productive domestic agricultural economy."

And like farmers in developing countries, those in Europe must also increase production, he said, because "poor countries will not be able to feed themselves in the future." The FAO expects the foodstuffs gap to multiply by five by 2030.

But new productive land exists only in the rainforests and savannas of the world - areas that are impossible to touch without harming the climate and biodiversity. Witzke said land already made arable simply has to be used more intensively than before - with, for example, new breeding methods like genetic engineering.

But because Europe has neglected to increase productivity over the past decade, it is putting increasing pressure on the rest of the world's land. And having become the world's greatest net importer of agricultural products, von Witzke said, "The EU has become a virtual land thief."

Author: Jutta Wasserrab / acb
Editor: Nancy Isenson